Antone Gonsalves of Techlearning (cited in Ray Schroeder of Educational Technology) reports that the $2 billion a year the U.S. government has spent since 1998 on creating school access to the Internet has had no effect on learning according to a University of Chicago study.

I'm not surprised. If technology is used as if one were in a traditional classroom, then why would learning change? For technology to promote learning past that of the traditional classroom, it must move past the traditional student-give-coursework-to-teacher-and-teacher-returns-to-student-the-product, in which there are no other participants. Technology, as noted in the previous post on classroom blogging, has the potential to create networks of learning within the classroom and across classroom boundaries, with classmates and others, thus creating real audiences and interactions that promote analysis, synthesis, and perhaps even engagement.

A teacher on Remote Access speaks of the need for students to acquire networks of learning:

In this era, we need to ensure that time is spent teaching kids how to evaluate and validate personal nodes and networks for academic purposes. A tool such as technorati may be a starting point to help get kids "up to speed" quickly for a certain set of concepts being worked on in a classroom. This may be a key. We need to learn how to create flexible learning networks for short periods of time. We need to learn how to teach kids the skills they need to quickly acquire a network and apprise themselves of a set of places they can look to for information. This is completely new and something teachers have not had to be concerned with in the past, but it is definitely a skills for our time. The ability to first of all locate nodes of information and second of all evaluate their usefulness and truthfulness for our needs is something for us to begin thinking about with the kids in our classrooms.